Waltham Community Response Collective works to bridge community health efforts 

Waltham-based housing initiative Watch CDC is bringing together Waltham nonprofits to help shore up services offered to those in need and better connect low-income residents with resources.

Known as the Waltham Community Response Collaborative, the program has participant organizations working together to identify and fill gaps in the social services they provide. 

As a part of that, the collective will better organize and centralize participants’ services to reduce redundancies, so they can help clients more efficiently and create systems to refer residents across organizations when they need specialized resources.

Participating nonprofits include Africano Waltham and the Waltham Boys & Girls Club.

The program is wrapping up its first year, which was designated as a planning period to connect partners and collect community feedback about gaps in the city’s services. 

In this first year Watch CDC staffers convened a resident advisory council of 15 Waltham residents who had previously worked with participating organizations. This council provides feedback and direction to the WCRC and its nonprofit members as WCRC works to implement its goals.

Funding from Boston Children’s Hospital

The Waltham Community Response Collaborative is part of a Boston Children’s Hospital program designed to build more robust networks of local nonprofits in Greater Boston communities. 

The program, which itself is part of the BCH Healthy Communities Initiative, is providing WCRC with up to $1 million in installments over the next five years.

Watch CDC won its bid for BCH funds approximately 18 months ago, in part by impressing the hospital with its existing relationships with other nonprofits in Waltham, said Tara Agrawal, director of community engagement in the BCH Office of Community Health. 

“I think they have just a really long and successful track record of community engagement,” Agrawal said. “Knowing how anchored they were in the local community and the history that they have, we thought that… there was a good chance they would be able to bring together partners.”

Agrawal said the hospital wants WCRC to identify specific gaps in local service coverage and start testing solutions in the upcoming year. She said the WCRC organizations have flexibility about what services they seek to improve with the BCH funding but are expected to provide “more cohesion among the service providers [and] more navigable systems.” 

Solving problems in Waltham and beyond

Although WCRC will look at Waltham-specific issues, Agrawal said she hopes it could identify solutions to universal problems, too. 

“Is what Watch and their partners are finding on the ground in Waltham … a unique issue to Waltham only? Or are they really able to shine a light on a systemic issue related to service accessibility and provisioning within a specific sector?” she asked.

As a BCH funding recipient, WCRC participants will have opportunities to confer with similar programs in Randolph and Brockton about their work. Agrawal said she hopes such opportunities shed light on how best to address social services issues in Waltham and beyond as well as how municipalities and other government bodies can work with community organizations to provide services.

WCRC partners said they’re enthusiastic about the project’s potential.

“[The WCRC is] about changing the approach citywide,” said Magali Garcia-Pletsch, executive director of the Waltham Partnership for Youth, one of the WCRC’s founding organizations. “We are trying to better coordinate so we have these direct relationships across service providers to better collaborate, better meet the needs of students and families, and hopefully speed up the process for getting families and young people resources and what they need.”